You've Got Five Pages, Beast of the North Woods by Annelise Ryan, to Tell Me You're Good.

Thank goodness for Annelise Ryan. If you listen to the first few minutes of this episode, you'll catch a little rant about my almost-selection and the tired trend of titles with "Daughter" in them. Already in 2022, other folks were sharing just how rampant those titles are. (The blog Fictitiously Yours covers quite a few). You'd think we'd be done with them by now! But nope--of all the suspense-ish books on that New Release shelf, I almost picked Joseph Finder's The Oligarch's Daughter. And while this book has a prologue (UGH), I was happy to read it. The dust jacket warns of a fisherman mauled to death by a Hodag, and the prologue is focused on sharing that crime scene with us, along with the reveal of the creature. For my fellow writers, this prologue's a lovely example of pacing: solid, steady, strong pacing. We have two paragraphs establishing the crime scene's witness and the wintry morning, and one paragraph to set up the scream. Every paragraph after is a fine balance of active movement and sensory observation, especially when it comes to discovering the body. Ryan could have placed the Hodag right by the body, but nope--it's a few more paragraphs of hearing mysterious grunts and scrapes while our witness tries to figure out how to call for help. Of course the witness presumes a bear is nearby (understandably so!), so when the Hodag is revealed near the end of the prologue, we readers are just as aghast as the witness. If you're looking for an escape from the world today, you can't do much better than a snowy adventure in Wisconsin's North Woods, hunting a creature long thought to be a hoax. :)And what will we discover in the following story's pages? We'll have to wait and see. xxxxRead on, share on, and write on, my friends!